


with a strange ambition for oblivion

by kimaracretak



Category: Dare Me - Megan Abbott
Genre: Alcohol, Canon-Typical Behavior, Emotional Manipulation, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:06:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23761279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: Beth sees it, then: the way she treats them like adults, like their ideas matter. Like she's interested in their lives, the ones that are the blank stretches of nothingness locked away under bobby pins and Eagles jackets and thick gold-glitter eyeshadow, the ones that don't have meaning outside of cheer and aren't going to just because Colette French asks a question or two.
Relationships: Beth Cassidy/Colette French
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17
Collections: What Fen Do (Instead of Going Outside)





	with a strange ambition for oblivion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darlingargents](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/gifts).



> For the strength of your hate I loved your bitterness  
> For the blood in your soul I loved your emptiness  
> — 'Perfidity', Jordan Reyne

Coach leaves her office unlocked, which is her first mistake, and doesn't show immediately after practice, which is her second. Beth leans back in the ratty leather chair with her smoothie and takes her time going through the drawers, but there's not much there. Two extra pairs of white shoelaces, a handful of pens, a cheap plastic lighter and trashy cigarettes - not even a can of hairspray or a stray lipstick.

She's not sure what she expected, really. Pictures of her kid? Pictures of Addy? Beth pulls a face at herself, rolling the tip of her straw around in her mouth. The kid would have been more surprising, even if Coach is trying a little too hard to fool everyone into thinking she doesn't have a very particular interest in Addy.

Beth kicks her feet up on the desk and swings her hips just enough that the chair spins under her, humming the counts from Addy's old tumbling run under her breath. Energy buzzes under her skin, restless and formless and so noisy it sets her teeth on edge. Practice used to be good for quieting it down but Coach doesn't work her a fraction of what she needs and there's no point showing off for Addy anymore. So she sucks at the smoothie, beet tops and matcha and five shots of the Grey Goose from her mother's liquor cabinet, and it's - something. Could maybe be something, if Addy were here.

"Cassidy," Coach says from the doorway, and Beth raises an eyebrow in acknowledgement. "This is completely -"

"Inappropriate?" Beth finishes. "I'm sure you know all about inappropriate things, Coach. Wanna make a scale, back-tuck me into the right spot?"

Irritation flickers across her face, brief and mean under all that mascara, and, gotcha, bitch, Beth thinks, but that doesn't feel like anything either. "What do you want?"

Beth hums around her straw, pretends to think it over. She likes wanting, likes the way it fizzles under her tongue and in her legs til she's weightless with it, but there's no use in admitting to wanting unless the other person can give it to you immediately - otherwise all you've done is given them your fat weak belly and asked them to gut you with pain. And Coach is a lot of things but she's smart enough to know that, smart enough to pretend her own wanting is some sick kind of joy instead, as if that means Beth can't use it against her.

"Well?" Coach's palms slam down on the desk hard enough that a sheet of paper skids towards the edge, last week's pyramid diagram with Tacy as the Flyer off to the garbage that it came from. Beth moves her feet deliberately, one on the outside of each of Coach's hands, and leans back as her skirt drags up her thighs.

Coach's gaze drops down to where Beth's cheer shorts are clinging to her thighs. "That how you get all the boys to take you seriously?"

"I don't care about boys," Beth says, which is true, and then, because this is the first time Coach has looked at her, really looked at her, says, "I care about you."

It's not even that much of a lie, she cares about what she's doing in town and to Addy and to Beth's fucking squad, but Coach is licking her lips like she thinks Beth means something else, and the vodka's soft at the edges of her vision. "I care about you taking responsibility for my girls," she says, and pink is rising high and dark on Coach's cheekbones and she's not stopping her, why isn't she stopping her. "I care about you putting me back on top before the fetus breaks someone's neck. I care about -"

"Enough." Coach's voice is high, almost desperate, her tiny gymnast tits heaving with every breath. "You need to go home, Beth, you can't do this to yourself."

And there it is: the wanting, the the hunger, the thing Coach thinks Beth doesn't have just because she doesn't want to see it in herself for what it is.

"To myself?" Beth reaches over to place her bottle on the table, chest approaching parallel with her legs. She's close enough to feel Coach's breath hot on her face. "Or to you?"

Coach closes her eyes, and her surrender pulses through Beth's body like an orgasm. Better than. "You shouldn't be doing this at all," but her voice is unsteady and her hand comes up to grip Beth's shin, like Beth's imagined her holding Addy too many times. "Beth."

"Colette." It's less mocking than she intends it to be. Coach sighs, and Beth inhales the lingering scent of cigarette smoke between them. "I don't think I'm the only one who wants something."

Coach laughs, a sharp, unhappy thing. "Might be the first true thing you've ever said to me," She breathes out, and Beth breathes with her. It's almost nice, sharing something with her, on the edge of stealing something from her. "Let's get the fuck out of here, Cassidy, okay?"

Beth tightens her thighs and abs, grips the sides of the desk and pulls herself up to sitting on the stained wood. Coach leans back and Beth follows, smacking a kiss to the air right in front of her, and Coach doesn't flinch. Half a point to the ice cunt.

"Yeah, that's my bitch," she grins. "Where to?" Her purse in her locker, she remembers a second too late. No keys, no cash, no wine - all she's got is her phone, tucked between her breasts, and Colette French staring at her. It's worse than Addy, better than all her mother's drugs.

Until Coach ruins it. "I'm taking you home. What did you think?"

"I think my home's the last place you want to be," Beth snaps, and doesn't say it's not very high on her list, either. Coach's house is off-limits, there's no way she's showing her face there after the rest of the squad has gotten roped into the yoga orgies and champagne pyramids, but there's still electricity singing through her and she wants to fuck, to fly, and she knows Coach is good for at least one of those. "I think you owe me a practice. A real one. Tacy's too scared to fly again and I need a reason why I should come back to you."

Coach's lips flatten, shading pale behind her cheap lipgloss. "I hold practice every day, Cassidy, you make your own choices about showing up to them."

Beth hooks a foot behind Coach's knee, urges her forward until she nearly stumbles between Beth's legs. "That counts as practice for the squad. Maybe. I. Want. More."

"And I want you to work with the squad. Who do you think is going to be responsible for flying you? If I fly you?"

But she's wavering. Beth shifts her weight on the desk, one sweat-slick thigh and then the other. She's damp under her cheer shorts, too, and shivers at the thought of leaving a wet patch on the desk for Coach to remember every time she sits down to look at budgets, review videos, call the father of her child and explain why it's more important that the squad come home with her than it is that he come home to her.

"I fly. Addy spots. Everything else is just details." Details that the squad is learning wrong, because flying JV trash that can't figure out which body parts should hit the mat first is nothing, nothing like flying a real Top Girl.

"Do you trust the girls who are going to fly you?" Coach asks, and Beth is suddenly desperately, terrifyingly aware that Coach is only still standing here because she wants to be.

"They're my squad, duh." Stretching out every word until it's taffy-thin, like the longer she takes to say them the longer Coach has to believe them. "You don't take away four years of memory and loyalty with a couple bottles of expensive booze, you know. You own them after practice, maybe, but out on the field every single one of those asses is mine."

Coach raises an eyebrow. "With the handprints to prove it, I assume."

"Ooh, kinky," Beth croons, approval papered over as thick as she can, because there's no way Coach knows how close to the truth she's gotten - the way Addy's ass presses back into her crotch when they fall asleep on the hood of the jeep up at Lanvers, the way Addy used to climb into her lap and let Beth knead her ass cheeks, _ooh, Hanlon, you working on those glutes for cheer or is there something you're not telling me?_ "Is that what we're gonna do when we leave? You're gonna spank me for being a bad girl?" 

Something dangerous flashes in Coach's eyes and she steps back. Breath too fast, thighs pressing together too hard, and ooh, yeah, you want it, Beth can tell. "Off the desk, Cassidy."

Beth purses her lips, pretends to consider that for just long enough that Coach's nostrils flare, and then she jumps down. Leans back, feels the edge sharp and grounding in the small of her back. "Sure. But I'm not bending over it for your strap. I like mouths."

Coach just stares at her, arms crossed over her chest. "You have absolutely no sense of boundaries, you know that?"

Beth shrugs. "Maybe you just don't like my boundaries." Only then does she think that she wouldn't have minded if Coach had taken her up on the offer that wasn't really an offer.

Coach raises an eyebrow. "That's not the point, and you know it." But she doesn't step back as Beth walks closer, just lets Beth draw them together until their noses are nearly touching. Beth looks down and her lips are parted, pink and wet.

"No," she says, "I don't know that at all." Because cheer is about bodies and what can be done to them, always has been, about how they build on top of each other into one whole, living, breathing thing that moves with its own heart and mind, and there can't be such a thing as boundaries there, not like Coach thinks she can impose. All it does is break them apart, make them weaker than even Tacy's spray tanned fake-muscled leg.

Coach licks her lips, and Beth wants to lean forward, bite down, lick the cigarettes and wine and lipstick right out of her, see what under those miles of pale skin Addy thinks is so goddamn important. "You need something inside that head of yours, Cassidy," Coach says, before she's decided whether to risk it. "Can't just shove other people in there and call the control good enough."

"Funny," Beth tilts her head, blinks up at Coach as innocently as she can, with the anger starting to spark deep in her belly. "Isn't that what you're trying to do, with my girls?"

Coach's whole body tenses up at that, and, I knew it, Beth thinks, triumph skittering along her skin like the moment before everyone's hands let go. Say it, admit it, we both know it gets harder to lie to me the longer you lie to them. But all Coach says is, "Do you want to talk about what's gone wrong, if it is?"

"I," Beth spreads her hand over Coach's hip, all the post-baby swell of fat and the hard bone still trying to peek through like she wants to be seventeen again. "I want to do anything but talk."

It's that that breaks her, has Coach grabbing Beth's hand and slapping it hard against her thigh. "Fine," she says, stepping back. "We're going for that drive. You can keep your mouth shut, if you want. And if it's possible for you to do that unaided."

Beth clamps her lips shut and covers them with a middle finger. _Make me_ , the words burn behind her teeth, _show me what you wanna give me when we're all alone_ , but there's the other urge too, to prove to Coach that she's more than some mouthy bitch, that she's only gonna do that when it suits her and she's perfectly capable of shutting up instead, and that's the one that wins out.

Coach makes a small noise at the back of her throat, not quite surprise and not quite interest, and Beth just smirks. "Get your stuff. My car in five."

Beth doesn't give her the satisfaction of a response.

**

Out in the lot, the sun dipping down over the trees and making the tops of the football stadium glint a wicked red and gold up into the sky, Beth flips the top off a bottle of blackberry cordial and drapes herself backwards over the hood of Coach's little car. She dribbles the cordial over her lips, licks it away from the corners of her mouth, and wishes she knew where Addy was. Wonders, for the first time, if Coach is actually going to make good on her threat to take her home.

She hears the crunch of Coach's heels on the gravel before she sees her, squints up at the sky and kicks her feet against the bumper. "Gonna break an ankle like that, Coach," she says.

Her shadow falls over Beth's face, stretched-out and wavering, the keys clenched between her fingers striping like prison bars over Beth's breasts. "Because your cheer shoes are appropriate footwear for a parking lot."

Beth kicks her legs up into the laziest of shoulder stands, toes pointed, ankles crossed, hips barely up. "Mine aren't on the ground of the parking lot," she points out. Her skirt's flipped down over her abs, black shorts exposed, and she wonders if Coach is looking at her again. Wonders if she could not look.

"And I'm sure you levitated over here." Flat and unamused, hardly the worse Coach has ever sounded. "Get up."

Beth rolls out of the shoulder stand because she can't think of a reason not to, careful not to knock over the bottle. "I've been so good, Coach," she says, twisting her torso round to find herself at eye level with Coach again. "You're not really gonna take me home?"

And somewhere - she let something slip in under the breathless invitation she'd meant it to be, she must have, because Coach pauses and gazes her up and down, lingering on her cordial, on the space between her eyes. "Where were you thinking?"

She hasn't thought that far ahead, but she's not going to fall into this easy of a trap. "Not Lanvers," she says, because that's Addy's place, her place and Addy's that Coach is never going to fit into no matter how easily she wormed her way into the gym. "But somewhere out there. Somewhere without all of ... this." She gestures with the bottle, wide and expansive: the rusted steel of the chain-link fence, the half-built structures like broken skeletons littering their way towards the horizon. "I don't wanna see all of this." _I want you to see me,_ she thinks, _see me and not erase me in the same breath_ , but that's not the sort of thing she admits on one vodka smoothie and the remembered taste of cordial.

Not until she's already forced it from Coach, at least, and by that point Beth expects Coach will be long gone.

Coach chews the inside of her lip, thinking it over, and Beth sees it, then: the way she treats them like adults, like their ideas matter. Like she's interested in their lives, the ones that are the blank stretches of nothingness locked away under bobby pins and Eagles jackets and thick gold-glitter eyeshadow, the ones that don't have meaning outside of cheer and aren't going to just because Colette French asks a question or two.

Like it makes any difference to her. Beth has never needed that kind of treatment to get what she wants, and any of the girls who did, who thought it made them special, well, they were just stupid, thinking that Coach was actually taking them seriously.

But then Coach says, "Fine," like she's come to some kind of decision, jerks her head to motion Beth off the hood of the car and unlocks the door. "Get in."

And just like that the illusion's gone, Coach barking orders like the world's gonna collapse if she doesn't, like Beth's a baby who can't do anything for herself. It's sad, almost, that she's so easy to see through. No commitment, despite what she demands from them on the floor.

Beth feels like she's being played, like it's working and she can't stop it, doesn't even know where to start, and the feeling sits sick and heavy in the pit of her stomach like a chocolate muffin. 

Coach drives, windows up and stereo silent, and Beth knows she's being punished, even though she's ended up doing everything Coach asked. She kicks her cheer shoes up on the dashboard and unsnaps her seatbelt as soon as they're out of the crappy faculty parking lot. "What is it for you?" she asks, tongue swirling around the mouth of her cordial bottle. "Giving the orders, or seeing all the JV cunts with glitter melting off their faces obey them?"

Coach's hands tighten on the wheel, white-knuckled to the edge of shaking. "Don't be stupid, Cassidy."

"Just a question." Beth rolls her eyes, but she's gotten the answer she wants anyway. 

"Just a question," Coach echoes, disbelief mocking her every word. "Nothing's just anything with you, Cassidy, don't you ever get tired of it?"

It feels like another trick, or like it should be, but Beth pauses. "No," she says, and she can't really believe herself, giving Coach this much consideration, "Because if I did, that would mean I had gotten tired of winning. And we both know I can't have that."

She glances over at Coach from the corner of her eye, watches her grip relax the slightest fraction. "No," Coach says thoughtfully - satisfied, even, like she's gotten something out of Beth, but if that was really new then Beth's been overestimating her for too long, and Beth doesn't do that. "You wouldn't be Beth at all if you could."

There's an insult somewhere there, even if Beth isn't quite sure what it is, and she scowls and downs half the bottle of too-sweet cordial that she shouldn't be drinking anyway. 

**

Coach's car isn't made for the roads in the woods, not like Beth's Jeep, and Beth grits her teeth as it scrapes along the rocky path. She's not surprised when Coach gives up the first moment they reach a clear space where it looks like she can park and still manage to get out again in one piece.

Beth jumps out of the car before Coach can tell her to, slamming the door behind her and pulling her right leg up into a perfect bow and arrow. "Where to now?" she asks. "Or am I the one who's gonna have to do all the work around here?" She does a half-turn, up on her tiptoes just because she can.

"You doing work would be a first," Coach says, but there's something softer about her voice up here. Loath as Beth is to admit it, she looks better up here, the setting sun bright in her curls and her eyes alive with a kind of desire Beth isn't used to seeing from anything other than her mirror.

"You giving me the opportunity to do work would be a first," Beth retorts. She drops her leg as Coach locks the car and heads for the entrance to something that could only generously be called a trail. Follows her at a more sedate pace, not letting her get too far ahead, but not giving her the satisfaction of chasing.

"Oh really?" Coach says, voice loud and dangerous above the sound of the leaves under their feet, Beth's cheer shoes light after the heavier crunch of the fancy running shoes Coach had changed into. "So when you called yourself Captain, that meant you worked with your girls? Or did you let your bitches do your handsprings for you while you watched from the top of the bleachers?"

"Because you practise with us," Beth says thinking about Coach stalking the sides of the gym, all in black and wound up tight, yoga-severe like her clothes fool any of them. "Or," and she lengths her stride, catching up without speeding up, "You practise with Addy."

Coach freezes, just half a second more than there should be before her foot comes down, and, _fuck_ , Beth thinks, because she'd known, driving past the Dairy Queen and seeing the total absence of Addy in the front window, and none of that compares to Coach telling her, however unwillingly.

"I practise with the people I can make something out of. The ones who want it. Who prove to me that they deserve it."

"And me?" Beth asks. Fingers catching on Coach's woven bracelet, the Cat's Tongue braid sticky with sweat and the waxy sheen of embroidery floss. "Or including me?" She tugs on it, hard enough that when Coach turns to face her neither of them can pretend she has nothing to do with it.

And Coach looks at her, really looks at her for what feels like the first time like she's evaluating her, not discounting her, and it's the worst thing to ever happen to her and the best, all wrapped up in one. "Oblivious is a bad look on you, Cassidy."

"Curious," Beth corrects, because she is, even though she doesn't expect Coach to tell her the truth. "Curious why you think Addy wants things and I don't. Is it just because she wants it from you?"

Coach smiles, thin-lipped and cruel. "You don't know her that well."

It spikes into Beth's heart like pulling splits too far, like fingers hitting the mat first and bending in ways no body ever should. "I used to." Before the summer. Before Casey Jaye and the Love-Me-Knot around Addy's wrist, the one she wouldn't throw into the gorge no matter how much she drank.

The crease between Coach's eyebrows smooths out at that, realisation flickering across her face. "Is that why you need to fly?"

Beth laughs, drops Coach's wrist as if it were suddenly as cold as the terror wrapping around the base of her neck. "Absolutely the fuck not."

She starts back down the trail, and doesn't look back to see if Coach is following or if she's just staring, that awful expression on her face like she's solved something fundamental to Beth - reached straight past every lie she's told today and ripped away the skin covering the part of her that's just the same as whatever lives beneath Coach's undented ribs. Let her think she's understood something, let her think Beth's some pathetic little girl who'll cry like a field hockey goalie over not getting the pussy she wants.

Never, ever, let her know the truth.

Coach does follow, though, Beth can feel her hot at her back when the path spills out into a clearing, sun-dappled and vibrant and oddly clear of the high school detritus that was synonymous with so many of the spots she usually found. When Beth turns to face her, she's absolutely unreadable.

"One-two three-four." It's not an order and it's not a request and none of it matters, because her body takes over, knees bending and ankles tightening as she launches herself up, standing back handspring, flick feet to hands to feet, double somersault and _do you even have abs, Cassidy_ , and round off into another double. Her palms are coated with dirt, legs and forearms pockmarked with twigs and rocks and fuck knows what from the ground that sinks under her feet and gives her nothing to spring back up from.

She's breathing hard, even though it's shorter than her usual run by one skill. The clearing feels smaller now that she's standing still, no verticality to break the world open in front of her, and being on the ground - it sucks, in a way she'd always known and never expected.

Coach nods, once, the closest thing to approval Beth's ever seen from her. "Yeah. You could be something, if you ever bothered to show to practise."

And just like that they're back three hours ago before Coach came back to her office to find Beth sitting on her desk, like nothing changed. "That's it? _Yeah_?"

"Yeah," Coach says. "You girls and your diet Cokes and your makeup. It got you onto the squad when you were eleven year old JVs, but it's not gonna keep on my squad. We're a stunt squad now, a tournament squad, and you need to stop worrying about whether the boys like drooling over you and start thinking about whether the scouts like watching you."

Beth shrugs, the adrenaline of the tumbling run starting to ebb from her body, coldness creeping in again. "No one likes watching Tacy fly. You really only have the one choice."

"A bad flyer who shows up every time she's supposed to, or a good one who's too far up her ass to see that there's people holding her up. Tell me again, Cassidy, what kind of choice I have?"

The memory of the dream rises up again, bile in the back of her throat: Tacy, falling, white cheer shoes blinding against RiRi's bloodsoaked face. "The choice that doesn't end with the fetus falling so badly she kicks someone's head clear off their shoulders."

Coach's face goes slack again, that look that can never quite mask all the calculations going on underneath it. "Not gonna happen if her girls keep her up."

Beth screws her eyes shut and wants to pinch the bridge of her nose, wants to scream, wants to climb her way up to the top of one of the trees and not come down until Addy comes to find her. "You don't know my squad. You only know what you're turning them into, and that's useless if you don't know what you're starting from."

She can hear Coach's footsteps drawing closer, feel the heat of her approaching, sense the formless thing she knows must be desire rising sharp-toothed in her belly. And then she stops.

"Really?" Beth asks in disbelief. "You'll fuck me in front of my team but you're too shy to do it in private, is that what this is?"

"That is absolutely not what this is about," Coach snaps, but she steps forwards anyway, into Beth's space like she isn't even sure she wants to be there.

"Isn't it?" Beth presses. "Because I'm getting really tired of you deciding it's time to pussy out and pretend every fucking conversation we have is about some nebulous else shit."

Coach reaches out, cups Beth's cheeks in her palms, and the touch of her skin is like nothing Beth's felt in longer than she wants to think about. "It takes two of us to do this. And you haven't stopped pushing since I first laid eyes on you."

"You wouldn't know what to do with me if I did," Beth says, voice tight and airless and it's not the conversation from the car but it's so close, and she still thinks there's something missing. Coach is still doing something just to the left of what Beth thinks she's doing, what she wants, needs her to be doing.

"What do you want me to do with you?" Coach asks, and it sounds real.

 _Fuck me_. It's on the tip of her tongue. It wouldn't be a lie, but it could be anything. "Fly me." Coach doesn't move. Beth grits her teeth. "Fly me, please."

Coach's finger's curl against Beth's face, manicured nails digging in hard enough that Beth hopes they'll break the skin. _See my body. See what I can make you do to it_. "Not without a spotter," she says, and it's something close to a victory even though Coach is stepping back as she says it, forcing Beth to open her eyes to stay aware of her. "But you can try something else. If you think you can handle it."

Beth flips her hair back, grabs one of the elastics from her wrist and binds it up tight. "You know I can." She wouldn't be offering otherwise.

Coach reaches out with cupped hands and Beth steps up, right foot in the cradle and left leg raised high. It's a baby balance lift, hardly even a stunt, and Coach is looking up with shining eyes. "On my shoulders," she says, and Beth snorts.

"You're not a Base," she says, "Slip of a thing like you."

"Trust," Coach says, and it's only because she's still looking that Beth - she doesn't know if she does, but she keeps on anyway, one knee and then the other and then rising, rising, until she's standing, and she thinks, fleetingly, that this is going to be the best view of her soaking cunt that Coach has had so far, her lips standing out against the thin wet fabric.

 _See what you do_ , she wants to say, _see why I have to hate you, or else -_

But all lying to your Base is ever gonna do is make you fall, and it's gonna be the fall that kills you, and Beth doesn't want to fall.

Doesn't think she wants to fall.

Coach's hands reaching between her thighs to lock hands tight around hers, thighs firm and legs forward, and Coach's knees dip. For a moment there's no gravity at all, just the handstand balanced on Coach's wrists and pointed toes brushing the top of the sky.

And then momentum takes over and Beth's parting her legs on instinct, open thighs wide around Coach's head as she swings, and all she can think about is the dream, about the Addy who hadn't learned how to spot yet and letting go and falling all the way down the gorge like the St Reggie's girl who jumped.

And all she can think is that it would be so easy to let go.


End file.
